Three Early Shaw Plays That Interrogate Marriage, the Family, and Women’s Roles (Mrs. Warren’s Profession, Candida, and You Never Can Tell)

An excellent and eminently teachable addition to the new Oxford World Classics Shaw series, this collection includes three early plays that could seem very different to those unfamiliar with the material and the milieu. Although Shaw wrote Mrs. Warren’s Profession (1893), Candida (1894), and You Never Can Tell (1896) within a three-year period, the first more than earns its place among his Plays Unpleasant, while the other two are Pleasant in altogether distinctive ways. While each has seen significant revivals, their theatrical destinies have been widely divergent, especially during Shaw’s lifetime. Mrs. Warren—an excoriation of the capitalist structures that drive poor women to prostitution—was officially censored by the Lord Chamberlain for three decades; within one, the domestic dramatic comedy Candida was a critical and commercial success on both sides of the Atlantic. As Eltis notes, the latter play does enable the actor playing the vulgar businessman Burgess to “clown”; that said, neither of those earlier pieces features anything like the commedia dell’arte-inspired humor of the seaside-set romantic comedy You Never Can Tell, which Shaw pitched toward producers looking for a West End–friendly hit.Fortunately for this edition’s readers, Eltis’s scholarly expertise encompasses not only these plays and this period, but also the stage history of sexually nonconforming women across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The author of Acts of Desire: Women and Sex Onstage 1800–1930, Eltis is well-positioned to make the argument that students of Shaw will benefit from reading these plays alongside one another. In the exemplary introduction, Eltis emphasizes that each play more or less brutally interrogates marriage and the family—“the twin institutions that bound together the fabric of Victorian society”—and “above all, women’s roles, not just as wives, daughters, and mothers, but also as citizens, economic agents, and self-governing individuals.” An efficient summary of the mass-mediated construction of the 1890s “New Woman” concludes with Eltis’s contention that the young female protagonists of all three plays are “unquestionably modern young women,” who are better understood in relation to that concept and to one another. Commentators discussing the college-educated, single-by-choice City worker Vivie Warren nearly always consider her vis à vis the New Woman. But fewer scholars strongly accentuate the resistant aspects of Never’s rationalist-turned-romcom heroine, or stress the modernity of Candida’s title character, a minister’s wife who stays married, as Eltis does. Here Eltis draws on her previous work on the established genres Shaw used to craft these morally contrarian plays. Swift summaries of the “popular seduction drama”—especially the “tragic courtesan” variety—and the “comedy of averted adultery” provide readers new to Shaw with the theatrical context they need to fully grasp these plays’ “moral iconoclasm,” and to determine for themselves where each sits in relation to feminisms of the past and present. Among the many informative (and admirably concise) explanatory notes is one citing scholars who have been working on Shaw and feminism since the 1980s, directing readers who wish to pursue the question further to field-shaping studies by J. Ellen Gainor, D. A. Hadfield, and Jean Reynolds, and others.Throughout the introduction, Eltis models for readers an alertness to the plays’ dramaturgical and moral complexities, as well as to their performance histories. Emphasizing what the “pragmatic and tough-minded” Vivie Warren shares with her mother, Eltis reads Miss Warren’s profession—actuarial science—as integral to the functioning of the capitalist economy, the gendered inequities of which Kitty exploits to her and her business partners’ advantage. References to Shaw’s manuscript drafts of that play efficiently demonstrate his efforts to strengthen the temperamental ties between mother and daughter, and to shift the focus of Vivie’s decision-making to Kitty’s capitalization on other women’s poverty. Brief descriptions of varying actor approaches and audience responses to Mrs. Warren and Mrs. Warren’s Profession make quick, contextualizing sense of its reception, first as a thoroughly immoral play and then as a thoroughly moral one. While this introduction is necessarily much shorter than L. W. Conolly’s in the Broadview Press edition of Mrs. Warren (2005), the work Eltis does here to historicize and interpret the play with maximum efficiency make this a worthy pedagogical complement to that indispensable volume.The placement of Candida after Mrs. Warren in this edition primes readers to consider how central economic and labor conditions—specifically for women who worked outside and inside the home—are to the former as well as the latter. Rev. James Morell’s pronouncements are often treated as more or less hollow, but his charge that the “worse than starvation wages” paid at Burgess’s factory drive women “to the streets to keep body and soul together” resounds across this volume. Further, Eltis’s introduction highlights Candida’s “labor and management skills,” as well as her “practical” nature and her “dignity.” An account of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood—an essential non-Marxist historical precedent for Shaw’s political beliefs as well as those of the play’s Christian Socialist minister—frames Candida’s economic critique as well as the spiritual elements that are more often discussed in the extant criticism. Eltis rightly stresses Candida’s complexities: the character is a hardworking, thoughtful, caring, competent, and thoroughly grown-up woman who teaches two differently incompetent men who and what each actually is and might endeavor to be; she also “exploits sexual attraction” to manage her own and her husband’s working lives. As at other points in the introduction, Eltis references Ibsen; here, it is not the much-cited comparison to A Doll’s House (1879) that stands out, but rather the very briefly traced link Eltis draws between Candida and The Lady from the Sea (1888). An early reviewer, quoted by Eltis, notes Candida’s central concern with “‘the independence of women’s souls.’” As Eltis reads her, Candida is Shaw’s “‘true Virgin Mother’” and a great deal more.The contextual frames Eltis places around You Never Can Tell will enable readers to detect the political and emotional complexities of a play that could seem, because of its genre and its farcical style, to be slighter than Mrs. Warren and Candida. “Under its playful surface,” Eltis argues, “this joyful seaside comedy is as iconoclastic and morally disruptive as the other plays in this volume.” Seeing in Gloria and Valentine the “precursors” to the conflicting young couple in the overtly, philosophically ambitious Man and Superman (1903), and highlighting the multi-generational feminist and socialist history encompassed by the characters, the editor draws out of the play both the early intimations of the “Life Force” that was to become so important to Shaw’s later thinking and writing, and also the Vivie-like qualities (if not outcomes) of Gloria’s carefully developed and independently exercised capacity for making her own life choices.Although the final section on “Plays Unpleasant and Pleasant and the Modern Stage” is very short, leaving comments on Shaw’s “pre-Brechtian” dramaturgy unfortunately underdeveloped (as was probably necessary, given the length of the plays), Eltis does remind the reader throughout the introduction that the “robust realism” of these plays has nothing to do with the “surface naturalism” of his contemporaries. Emphasizing the exceptionally vigorous and “non-naturalistic” performance style these plays demand, Eltis clarifies for new readers the manner in which the texts should live onstage if they are to do their emotional, artistic, and political work.The plays themselves are the 1931 Constable edition texts, presented in a clean, easy-to-read format that departs in several ways from Shaw’s own textual and typographical practices, for reasons that Eltis and general editor Brad Kent explain in a substantial note. Only the Mrs. Warren preface is included, probably for reasons having to do with volume length. That is a good choice: if you have to pick one among the three to print, that’s the one. The explanatory notes are excellent throughout. They offer the interested reader carefully selected excerpts from Shaw’s manuscript drafts and letters, as well as succinct summaries of historically relevant events and discourses. For example, one note for Mrs. Warren describes the so-called “White Slave Trade” moral panic fueled by W. T. Stead’s sensational (and journalistically suspect) reporting on English prostitution in little more than 250 words. Another cluster of notes makes the generationally specific feminism of Never’s Mrs. Clandon legible for readers, right down to her costume. When objectionable terms appear in the texts—such as an anti-Semitic trope used by Valentine—Eltis forthrightly explains but does not excuse them.For those seeking an affordable, well-edited volume that includes more than one of these early plays, it is an excellent choice, whether for the classroom or for personal study. As I write this, however, Eltis’s edition is not available for purchase outside the UK. Readers in other parts of the world should look forward to its eventual appearance on their bookshelves.